Streitraum 2020/21: Die andere Schock-Therapie – welche Gesellschaft wollen wir »nach« COVID-19 sein?

The crisis of the pandemic is working like a contrast agent injected into society, rendering visible what is ailing us, what is weakening and harming us, but also what is indispensable and needs to be redistributed, supported or expanded. Even before the coronavirus outbreak, there was not just one but a multitude of social questions: How can social inequality be tackled? How can the exclusion of economically and culturally marginalised people be addressed collaboratively? What value is given to human work in the age of artificial intelligence and digitalisation? How can the erosion of public infrastructure be halted, the monetisation of all areas of life? What would an ecological transformation of agriculture, transport policy and the economy look like that equitably distributes the costs? Political lethargy or reluctance has so far prevented these questions from being answered. But some of the parameters in the political discourse have now changed: the neoliberal dogma of deregulation no longer remains unabatedly in force. The importance of social welfare systems, the indispensability of investment in healthcare and decent salaries—but also how the debt ceiling is no longer sacrosanct—can all be denied no more.

How can we prevent all these lessons from being forgotten as soon as the crisis is »over«? Which political and social utopian visions are now required? How should a different normality be conceived?

Streitraum is a monthly discussion series at the Schaubühne that has been moderated and curated by publicist and author Carolin Emcke since 2004. Scientists, writers, politicians, artists and other public figures are invited to join the discussion. The Streitraum focuses on a new topic every season. All nine episodes can be watched live online.

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Streitraum 2019/20: »Brave New Bodies, Brave New Humanity?«

How is our concept and experience of the body and different physicalities changing in the 21st century – and what consequences does this have for our notion of the self? How we perceive our bodies, how we learn to handle them and how this is passed on to the next generation has always been an area of conflict with regard to cultural, religious and social practices and convictions. The way in which bodies are veiled, exposed, exhibited, cared for and treated, the images that categorize bodies as male or female, beautiful or ugly, healthy or sick and make them visible or invisible have always been shaped by normative and commercial considerations.

The 2019/20 »Streitraum« wants to explore how medicaltechnical developments in prosthetics, such as artificial intelligence and robotics, and also the total pervasiveness and use of digital technologies in every area of our lives, are changing our body(images) and self-identity. What does humanism mean, what is the social ‘us’ under these conditions? Which economic, commercial interests are controlling and programming the algorithms that increasingly determine our fitness, diet and health? How are our self-images and our concepts of desire, sexuality and death being changed by the new technologies?

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Streitraum 2018/19: »Identity and Representation«

Today, when we talk about identity, it is not always clear what this refers to: cultural, religious or social groups? Gender, ethnic background or nationality? Which ambivalent identities can help us understand social formations today? Which attributions and projections make the affiliation to a certain social or religious group or way of life more difficult, and which make it easier? Which images and ideas are instrumental to stigmatisation? Why are class divisions held to be so taboo it is as though they do not exist: social exclusion or distinction which is passed down from generation to generation? What does it take for democratic societies to again become more open, hybrid and pluralistic? What is the relationship between identity and representation? Parliamentary and political representations are coming under increasing criticism, but the forms that media and artistic representations take also need to be scrutinised. Which images, which narratives are quoted and repeated, which are suppressed and forgotten? How are stereotypes created which reinforce notions of »authentic« and »fake«, of »us« and »the other«? How liberally, critically or maliciously can people or groups be portrayed or caricatured? Which criteria apply to art, music, film and the theatre?

Since the season 2004/05, the monthly series »Streitraum« is curated and moderated by publicist Carolin Emcke at the Schaubühne.

Streitraum is supported by 

Streitraum 2017/18: »Knowledge and Power«

For a long time it was an accepted truism that whoever possesses knowledge and education also possesses power and status. Conversely, access to knowledge and education was held to be a form of redistribution and a way out of powerlessness. »Streitraum« 2017/18 wants to investigate what remains of these assumptions today. For, obviously, very different confi gurations also apply: with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump it would appear that ignorance (or even downright lying) is astonishingly powerful. The explicit anti-intellectualism of various populist movements pursues a systematic attack on institutions of knowledge transfer such as universities, cultural foundations and the theatre. In a time when digital media facilitate access to knowledge faster and broader than ever before, they are only one of the areas of confl ict where knowledge and ignorance, as well as power and powerlessness, are being negotiated. How unequal or unfair is the distribution of knowledge? What are the root causes of the lack of social mobility in a society? How do radical political movements and networks, but also authoritarian, chauvinistic regimes, succeed so powerfully in propagating and orchestrating their ideologies and crimes? Which technological and aesthetic counter-strategies can be utilised against the dissemination of lies, defamation and hate? Are violent confl icts increasingly shifting into the sphere of cyber-warfare? And what does that mean for the ability to criticise them? In the 2017/18 season »Streitraum« wants to place these very different phenomena in the spotlight: the social issue of inequality as well as questions about authoritarian regimes and the »invisibles« in society – and the types of power arrangements they create.

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Streitraum 2016/17: »Unlimited unbounded – or: why do we need borders?«

Which forms of necessary and unnecessary borders do we have and need? Borders both exclude and confine, sometimes they protect, sometimes they imprison. Borders can be soft or hard. There are emotional and territorial borders, limits of tolerance and boundaries of shame. During the last two years seemingly firm lines have been crossed and open borders closed again. The 2016/17 season’s »Streitraum« discussion series seeks to address these different forms: which curbs on tolerance does an open society require? And what are the necessary limitations on »people should be allowed to say that«? On what sort of agreements are notions of distinctions between genders based? And between religions?

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Streitraum 2015/16: Tolerated Injustice?

How much inequality, how much injustice can a society actually endure? Have we now become so inured that we accept injustice as having – in Angela Merkel’s words – »no alternative«? How has it come about that the hardships and desires of the disadvantaged – the demands and protests of women or Muslims or the elderly – are now only raised by these people themselves and rarely succeed in mobilising those who are not directly affected? Is fatigue the reason for our willingness to tolerate economic inequality to an ever-growing extent? Or is it fear? Which strategies, which visions are required for the project of building a fair society? What significance does education have in this, what roles can theatre, film and literature play in generating images and narratives of equality and justice?

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Streitraum 2014/15: In Search of Democracy – or the Public Sphere and Mistrust

What is the current state of democracy? Has it become, as American theorist Wendy Brown believes, an empty term to which everyone stakes a claim but which no one any longer knows how to fill with legitimate practices and convictions? Has it lost its place in times during which the nation state appears to have grown increasingly irrelevant as a political agent? In times during which private corporations and quasi-governmental secret services can establish apparently extrajudicial regimes undisturbed: how and where can political legitimacy be generated? At the same time, a structural change of the public sphere is transforming the traditional media landscape: discourses about democratic selfdetermination are increasingly relocating to online social networks and, in doing so, are subject to different requirements and opportunities of privacy and being in the public domain, of vulnerability and self-empowerment. In this twofold crisis of representation, in which both the institutions of democracy and of the media are being brought into question, where is the place in which our political, social and aesthetic needs, desires and rights can be negotiated and claimed?

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